Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

NOTES

tician, who held chairs at Johns Hopkins and Oxford Universities. 715. 636. Cambridge. The study of mathematics has long been an important part of the curriculum at Cambridge University.

662. Mr. Darwin's famous proposition. The proposition occurs in Part IV, chapter 21, of The Descent of Man, and is really a summing up of the whole book. 716. 741. A Sandemanian. A member of the religious sect founded in Scotland by Robert Sandeman, about 1725.

Arnold was for many years a government inspector of schools.

718. 952. A school report.

In this

719. 1005. Letters will call out, etc.
sentence Arnold sums up his entire argu-

ment.

HUXLEY

IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

720. This essay was delivered as a lecture in London, January 7, 1866, and is included in Volume I, Methods and Results, of Huxley's collected works.

721. 89. Laud.

William Laud (1573-1645),
Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the
head of the established English Church,
and a violent enemy of the anti-Stuart
parties, who accomplished his execution
in 1645. The Earl of Rochester and Sir
Charles Sedley were court wits and poets
in the time of Charles II.

722. 187. Principia. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-
1727) published the Philosophia Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, setting forth his
theories about gravitation, in 1689.
208. Inquisitorial cardinals. Galileo (1564-
1642) was persecuted by the Inquisition
because of his acceptance of Copernicus's
theories concerning the solar system.
214. Vesalius and Harvey. Vesalius was
a Belgian anatomist of the 16th century;
William Harvey (1578-1657) was
English physician who published in 1628
a treatise De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis
in which he set forth the theory of the
circulation of the blood.

239. Writ in water.

an

Keats suggested as his epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

723. 266. Revenant. Ghost.

309. Boyle, .. Evelyn.

Robert Boyle (1627-1691), an English chemist; and John Evelyn (1620-1706), the diarist. 726. 653. Count Rumford. Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814), a scientist of international reputation.

NEWMAN

THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

728. 33. On an occasion like this. The Discourses on University Subjects were delivered in 1852 before the Catholics of Dublin.

An

731. 361. "The world is all before it."
adaptation of Paradise Lost, xii: 646-7:
"The world was all before them, where to
choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their
guide."

375. The judgment-stricken king. Pentheus, in Euripides's Baccha, in his madness sees two suns. 732. 446. St. Thomas.

Thomas Aquinas (1227?-1274), canonized in 1323; one of the greatest of the scholastic philosophers. 733. 524. Pompey's Pillar. A column erected at Alexandria in honor of Diocletian. Four square. Nil 734. 627 ff. τετράγωνος. admirari. To wonder at nothing. Felix qui, etc. Happy is he who has come to know the relationships of things, and has placed beneath his feet all fear, and inexorable fate, and the roar Virgil's Georgics, ii. greedy Acheron. 490 ff.

of

735. 704. The learning of a Salmasius or a Burman. Claude Saumaise (1588-1653) Pieter was a French classical scholar. Burmann the Elder (1688-1741) and his nephew Pieter Burmann the younger (1714-1778) were both Dutch scholars. 706. Imperat aut servit. It is either master or servant.

738.

Brute force with710. Vis consili, etc. out intelligence falls by its own weight. 712. Tarpeia. A woman of Roman legend, crushed to death by the shields of Sabine warriors, when she asked for what they wore on their arms (bracelets) as a reward for betraying Rome.

1031. Genius loci. Genius of the place. 739. 1153. The exiled prince. See As You Like It, II. i. 16.

1156. The poor boy in the poem. "Crabbe's Tales of the Hall. This poem, let me say, I read on its first publication, above thirty years ago, with extreme delight, and have never lost my love of it; and on taking it up lately, found I was even more touched by it than heretofore." (Newman's note.)

[blocks in formation]

the same name corresponds exactly to the poem.

SISTER HELEN

741. Founded on the old superstition that a woman deserted by her lover, could obtain the power of life and death over his body by making a waxen image of him, and laying it in the heat of the fire; as the wax melted the man's life ebbed away. There are three speakers, -the wronged woman, her small brother, who does not understand what is going on, and a spectator, whose comments, slightly varied from verse to verse, keep pace with the progress of the story.

[blocks in formation]

THE EARTHLY PARADISE: AN APOLOGY

746. The Earthly Paradise is a collection of twenty-four tales in verse, commonly considered the best body of narrative verse that has been given to English poetry since Chaucer's time. In the Prologue Morris tells how "certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway, having considered all that they had heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and after many troubles and the lapse of many years came old men to some Western land, of which they had never before heard"; the inhabitants of this land are of Greek descent. For the entertainment of the wanderers, the dwellers in the western land give semi-monthly feasts, at each of which a story is told. The duty of telling a story alternates between the two peoples; half the tales are, accordingly, from the Greek mythology, half of Scandinavian or Romance origin. 25. The ivory gate. The house of Morpheus, god of sleep, had two gates, through which dreams issued: if true, the

dream passed through a gate of horn; if false, through one of ivory.

PROLOGUE

746. 7. Below bridge. Navigation stopped at London Bridge.

747. 15. Bills of lading. Chaucer was for a time a clerk of the customs.

ATALANTA'S RACE

748. 63. Fleet-foot One. Ordinarily the epithet would indicate Hermes; in this connection it may mean Artemis.

750. 177. Saffron gown. Saffron was the color used at marriages by the Greeks and Romans; cf. L'Allegro:

"There let Hymen oft appear

In saffron robe, with taper clear." 184. Sea-born one. Venus.

751. 208. Adonis' bane. The wild boar. 752. 275. Three-formed goddess. Artemis, or Diana, so called because she was worshipped as Diana on earth, as Luna in heaven, as Hecate in hell.

279. Her. Diana.

282. Sea-born framer. See note on l. 184. 755. 516. Damascus. Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of love, was identified with Venus. 756. 535. Saturn's clime. Saturn ruled the world before his place was usurped by Zeus, or Jupiter; Saturn's reign was identified with the golden age, a time of peace, plenty, and happiness.

758. 663. Mighty Lord. Zeus. 664. Her. Venus.

PATER STYLE

By argu

760. 22. Efforts to limit art a priori. ment from hypotheses concerning material, etc.

92. Absence or presence of metrical beauty. Wordsworth's views are expressed in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

761. 96. Dichotomy. A division into two classes.

109. I propose here to point out. Pater here states the purpose of the essay. He is to discuss not prose or poetry, but both, finding in both certain identical characteristics, the qualities of "literature as a fine art."

165. Livy, Tacitus, Michelet. Jules Michelet (1798-1874), like the two Romans, was a historian.

[ocr errors][merged small]
[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

609. Dean Mansel. Henry L. Mansel (1820-1871), Dean of St. Paul's from 1868 to his death.

767. 769. Swedenborg. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), founder of the New Church, or Swedenborgians. The Tracts for the Times were written and published by John Henry Newman and his associates in the so-called "Oxford Movement," during the years 1833-1841. The last of the tracts, No. 90, was condemned by the University because of its Romanism. 768. 952. Blake's rapturous design. One of the illustrations made by Blake for Blair's Grave represents "Soul and Body

Reunited."

769. 1057. Buffon. Le Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), a famous French naturalist.

WORDSWORTH

772. 36. Most serious critical efforts. See the selections from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

38. The excesses of 1795. The culmination of the Reign of Terror.

773. 117. Disciplina arcani. Discipline, or learning, of the mystery.

158. Senancour. Obermann, by Etienne de Senancour (1770-1846), is characteristic of this interest in nature. Gautier (1811-1872) was an enthusiastic Romanticist, a dramatist, poet, and playwright. 161. Rousseau. The importance of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse in awakening people to the influence of nature upon the soul, and the influence of Rousseau's theories concerning the " state of nature," have been often pointed out. Chateau

briand (1768-1848) and Victor Hugo (1802-1885) were both significant in the development of French romanticism. 773. 173. Reynolds or Gainsborough.

The two greatest English portrait painters: Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). 211 ff. The first three quotations are from The Prelude; the fourth is from The Pet Lamb.

775. 411. A selection of language really used by men. See the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, p. 389.

Johannes

776. 452. George Sand. Her most famous
novel, La Petite Fadette, is known in
English translation as Fanchon the Cricket.
The author's real name was Mme. Aman-
dine Dudevant.
457. Meinhold.
Meinhold
(1797-1851) was a little-known novelist
whom Pater considered significant in the
history of German romanticism.
777. 588. Ánima mundi. Soul of the universe.
778. 703. The Ode... had its anticipator.
See Henry Vaughan's The Retreat, p. 123.
779. 747. Grandet, Javert. Characters in
Balzac's Eugenie Grandet and Victor
Hugo's Les Misérables, respectively.
785. Antique Rachel. In Dante's Pur-
gatorio, xxvii, Rachel is a type of the
contemplative life.

797. One who had meditated.
Morley.

STEVENSON

ES TRIPLEX

Lord

780. 24. Dule tree. A tree used as a gallows. 781. 104. The blue-peter. A blue flag indicating that a ship was about to sail.

141. The valley at Balaclava. The scene of the famous charge of the "Light Brigade" in the Crimean War.

145. Curtius. A hero of Roman legend who leaped into a chasm in the Forum, and sacrificed his life that the gulf might be closed.

159. Caligula. The third emperor of Rome, who proclaimed himself a god. 782. 187. The sheet. The rope by which the position of a sail is controlled. If it be tied, or "made fast," a sudden gust of wind may upset a small boat before the sailor has an opportunity to loosen the sheet.

206. Omar Khayyam... Walt Whitman. Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet who died c. 1123. Walt Whitman, an American poet famous for his wholesale violations of the conventions of poetry, died in 1892.

214. The same stuff with dreams. See Shakespeare's Tempest, IV. i. 156:

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

783. 303. As the French say. A cul-de-sac.

783. 312. A Bath-chair. An invalid's chair, much used at Bath, the health resort. 320. Our respec ed lexicographer. Samuel Johnson.

[ocr errors]

327. Bound with triple brass. The title
of the essay, "Es Triplex," meaning
'triple brass," is from Horace, Odes, I. iii.
394. Nelson.
Before the battle of the
Nile, Nelson made the remark to his offi-
cers. See Southey's Life of Nelson, chap-
ter v.: "Before this time tomorrow, I
shall have gained a peerage, or West-
minster Abbey."

784. 416. The last paragraph might almost have been written by Stevenson as prophetic of the close of his own life.

SWINBURNE

ATALANTA IN CALYDON

785. The poem is a drama in the Greek form. 5-8. There is reference here to two stories of the nightingale, both accounting for the melancholy in its song. According to one, Ædon killed her son Itylus by error, and was changed by Zeus into a nightingale. The tongueless vigil refers

to the better known story of Philomela, ravished by her brother-in-law, Tereus, who cut out her tongue that she might not bear witness against him; she was afterward changed to a nightingale. Cf. Arnold's poem Philomela, p. 687. 785. 10. Maiden . . . lady. Artemis, the moon-goddess, patroness of chastity. 786. 38. The oat. The shepherd's pipe of oaten straw, contrasted with the lyre, symbolic of a more elaborate, sophisticated society.

44. Mænad, Bassarid. Names equivalent to Bacchanal (1. 49), one of the Bacchantes, female followers of Bacchus, who engaged in wild orgies in the god's honor.

TO WALT WHITMAN IN AMERICA 787. Whitman seemed to Swinburne, as to many others, to be the prophet and poet of the new democracy which America was to offer to the Old World.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

790. 9. If all the pens, etc. A quotation from Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I, V. i.

[blocks in formation]
« AnteriorContinuar »